Pleroma

Pleroma

Richard Moss | @MossRC@social.mossrc.me

Author of *Shareware Heroes: The renegades who redefined gaming at the dawn of the Internet* and *The Secret History of Mac Gaming*, as well as two upcoming books — one on the creation of #AgeOfEmpires and the other about the history of football (soccer) games.

Writer/director on TerrorBytes: The Evolution of Horror Gaming, an upcoming five-part docuseries about horror games. Producer/co-writer on FPSDOC, a 4.5-hour documentary film celebrating the first-person shooter genre (with an emphasis on the 90s/early-2000s golden age) that's guided by the developers themselves.

Creates The Life & Times of Video Games and Ludiphilia podcasts.

He/him.

rich@mossrc.me
@MossRC on Twitter and @mossrc.bsky.social on Bluesky.

Posts mainly about #gamedev and #indiegames histories and stories, #retrogaming/#retrogames, #retrocomputing, #classicmac, #shareware, #tombraider, and #videogamehistory.

Richard Moss MossRC
11 years after I first wrote about the Championship Manager 01/02 fan community keeping the game up-to-date with the latest in world football — https://www.eurogamer.net/keeping-the-game-alive — they're still going. The October 2024 data update just landed.
https://champman0102.net/viewtopic.php?t=6453

Richard Moss MossRC

Directing a horror gaming documentary is weird. Sometimes I'm trawling through archival records, other times I'm puzzling out how to craft a compelling story from ~50 interviews. And then there are moments where I'm a digitised Keanu Reaves getting beaten up by flying books. (And I wouldn't have it any other way.)

Richard Moss MossRC
Excellent review of my new book about the history of football (soccer) videogames. Big takeaways are "The end product is a glorious reminder of when times for football games were simpler" and "a must-have for any football and video game fan". https://www.mirror.co.uk/gaming/soccer-stars-oddballs-tale-two-33915889

Richard Moss MossRC

I had a great time talking on the Retro Asylum podcast about football games, my new book, and the family-centric nature of sports videogame nostalgia. https://retroasylum.com/2024/10/20/episode-340-a-tale-of-two-halves-richard-moss-interview/

Retro Asylum podcast cover art for an episode about the book A Tale of Two Halves.

Richard Moss MossRC
@keen456 Not only a mention of Soccer Kid but also an interview with one of its creators. We thought it'd be fun to include a bunch of football-themed games — others include Roy of the Rovers, GO! GO! Beckham, and some card games.

Richard Moss MossRC

@iSabreman Yes, definitely. Even showing restraint and leaving out anything I felt was overly derivative, I still ended up with more than 30 Spectrum football games. There was a point also where I considered going for just 2D titles, since there are hundreds of them, and then leaving 3D for a volume 2, but I really liked the idea of showing the slow, messy transition from 2D to 3D.

Richard Moss MossRC

And I'm touched by the lovely praise in Time Extension's review of A Tale of Two Halves.

"If you're a fan of footy video games and yearn for the good old days when each week seemed to see the release of a new interactive take on the sport, then you'll absolutely love this; Moss' accessible, knowledgeable but often amusing prose is a joy to read, and brings to life one of the most exciting periods in video game history – an era we're unlikely to ever see again."

https://www.timeextension.com/reviews/a-tale-of-two-halves-the-history-of-football-video-games

Richard Moss MossRC

Design Week interviewed me about my new book and some of the design insights I've picked up while writing it. https://www.designweek.co.uk/the-greatest-and-strangest-football-video-games/

Richard Moss MossRC

It's publication day for a dream project of mine: A Tale of Two Halves: The History of Football Video Games, a 628-page book about the many many attempts to distil the beautiful game (association football) into digital interactive entertainment.

A Tale of Two Halves explores 30+ years of football games in all their forms—even platformers like Soccer Kid and GO! GO! Beckham—with a season-by-season breakdown of the genre's history, lots of insight, and plenty of fun stuff like PES player shirts and pixel illustrations. And 13 in-depth interviews, too.

It comes in two flavours: a standard edition, with shoelace bookmark ribbons for a touch of whimsy, and a "Captain's Edition" that adds in a heavy-duty slipcase and swanky fabric armband emblazoned "Captain." Both are available directly from Bitmap.

https://www.bitmapbooks.com/pages/search-results-page?q=tale%20of%20two%20halves

(Or if you're in Australia, you'll save loads on shipping by going to Pixel Crib: https://www.pixelcrib.com.au/search?options%5Bprefix%5D=last&q=tale+of+two+halves)

Richard Moss MossRC
Bitmap Books boss Sam Dyer and I talked to Premortem Games for an article about our new book A Tale of Two Halves: https://premortem.games/2024/10/16/a-deep-dive-into-the-beautiful-video-game-in-a-game-of-two-halves-by-bitmap-books/

Richard Moss MossRC
First review of my new book comes from no other than the vaunted Edge magazine, which calls it a “breezy yet encyclopaedic history of football games”.
A review of A Tale of Two Halves in Edge magazine. Full text: Bitmap Books gives 110 per cent to this breezy yet encyclopaedic history of football games. A heartfelt foreword by Clive Tyidesley (for years the voice of FIFA) kicks us off, before an overview of the earliest crude simulations, then a season-by-season guide starting from 1981. Even ardent fans will struggle to find gaps here, with inclusions right down to curios from the likes of East Germany, and it's all cheerily wrapped in pixel art and end-of-season awards. That the authors stop their annual review at 2010 is no sign of flagging energy, either. Rather, it underlines EA's Manchester City-like dominance since, and the loss of variety incurred along the way.

Richard Moss MossRC
If you are a journo, podcaster, YouTuber, blogger, or streamer who would like to talk to me about my new Bitmap-published book A Tale of Two Halves: The History of Football Video Games, out later this month, hit me up. Email is rich@mossrc.me

vga256 vga256@dialup.cafe

in 25+ years of retro gaming and interacting with sierra fans, i've never once seen someone mention Hoyle's Book of Games

despite its small stature, it was one of the most financially lucrative sierra titles, and spawned an entire series of games.

what makes it special is that opponents are (for the most part) characters from sierra titles, each playing in a style expressive of the character's personality. graham and rosella are friendly and not overly competitive, larry is silly and aggressive with his cards.

the dog? the dog is a real shithead.

A screenshot of Hoyle's Book of Games for DOS. A game of cribbage was just won by a bulldog, who smugly smiles, sticking its tongue out. It scored 16 points on its last hand.

Richard Moss MossRC
@gentarkin That’s a very visual and graphic explanation. I don’t know if I can be bothered to open it up to find out, given that I’d been thinking of replacing it anyway.

Richard Moss MossRC
My decade-old secondary desktop computer monitor faded to black and then after a power cycle made an ear-shattering white noise scream. After another power cycle it crackled for a while and then was back to normal.

Presumably I’m meant to conclude it’s possessed…or dying. I’m pretty amazed that it lasted this long, given I bought around 2012 as some cheap crappy thing with a dodgy power adapter from Kogan (Aussie Amazon-alike online retailer known for selling unreliable Chinese rebrands).

Richard Moss MossRC
Good to see some research looking at attitudes to and preferences for COVID mitigation among people with existing health conditions, which is nearly half the population in Australia. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hex.70025

Having said that, though, I wonder if either the study is non-representative or a large percentage of people with comorbidities avoid leaving the house. Why? Because I’m often the only person wearing a mask when I’m out in public, no matter the venue. (And for me the risk of COVID exposure is less a concern than asthma and allergy triggers.)

Richard Moss MossRC
@rk @vga256 It does, yes, although the Fish Disks get more attention in the book than Aminet.

vga256 vga256@dialup.cafe

thanks to @MossRC’s exceptional book Shareware Heroes, TIL that TUCOWS stood for The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software.

Its earliest incarnation began in 1991 when founder Scott Swedorski, then a recent college graduate, took a job at a library consortium as a system administrator for an initiative called FALCON (Flint Area Library Cooperative Online Network). 'At the time people started hearing more and more about getting online, he recalls, 'but there was no simple way to do it unless you wanted to use something like AOL or Prodigy.' Swedorski wanted to help library patrons navigate what the online world had to offer, and so he came up with a simple one-page document. 'It highlighted some applications with instructions on how to install and use them,' he says. But quickly the document expanded to two pages, then three, then four, and so on, and in his spare time Swedorski decided to teach himself HTML and turn it into a website. He called it The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software - referencing its focus on Windows networking software. Fans called it UCOWS or TUCOWS for short (in September 1995 it would officially become TUCOWS after the purchase of a tucows.com domain name).

Richard Moss MossRC
Here’s an infographic I found at the time, to help with my presentation.
Flappy Bird by the numbers chart from App Annie. It shows that the game’s meteoric rise to fame mostly happened in January 2014, as only 517 of its 108k reviews came before then. The game debuted in May 2013.

Richard Moss MossRC
This news that Flappy Bird is coming back reminds me of a bit of personal trivia: I did a four-week intensive data journalism course in early 2014 during my Masters and for one of the assignments I examined the numbers behind the Flappy Bird phenomenon around the world. It was immensely popular, very very suddenly.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/12/24242791/flappy-bird-relaunch-2025-new-game-modes

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